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Authors: Diogo Brito Sobreira, João Eustáquio de Lima, Jair Andrade de Araújo, Wellington Ribeiro Justo
Keywords: private and public schools, educational performance, PISA, decomposition
Abstract: This study analyzes the educational performance inequalities in PISA among Brazilian students from private and public schools. We try to identify the contribution of the differences between tangible and intangible factors to the gap between the types of schools by combining Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition techniques with unconditional quantile regressions. The results show that the effect of the private school on the decrease when we include student, family, and school characteristics, remains positive and significant, with this effect still higher in quantiles close to the median of the distribution of performance in mathematics. The decomposition suggests that the differences of tangible factors are more important throughout the performance distribution, which could be explained, mainly, by the differences in the familiar background. Nevertheless, the differences between the coefficients tend to increase their contribution to the gap between private and public schools throughout the distribution of performance in mathematics. This could be attributed to the fact that unobserved individual, family, and school factors are more relevant in explaining the gap between high-performance students than in lower quantiles. Thus, larger public investments that balance students in terms of tangible resources, especially the family background, could reduce the differences between the two types of schools to a greater extent than balance them in terms of intangibles. On the other hand, policies that influence intangible aspects of families and schools, such as motivation, leadership, management and autonomy, perception, parental participation, among others, are proportionally more important to reduce performance differentials between private and public school students. high performance. However, research that estimates causal relationships of aspects considered intangible to explain the gap between students in private and public schools may broaden the contributions to this theme.